Slide Notes

Not just for Christmas: using online courses to engage educators with open resources.

In December 2014 Regent’s University London offered an open online course, The Twelve Apps of Christmas. This course attracted hundreds of active participants from HE institutions worldwide. Over the course of the twelve days educators were introduced to a diverse range of free applications and resources with potential for use in teaching.

Not just for Christmas...

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Not just for Christmas...

Andy Horton @fechtbuch, Chris Rowell @chri5rowell

Not just for Christmas: using online courses to engage educators with open resources.

In December 2014 Regent’s University London offered an open online course, The Twelve Apps of Christmas. This course attracted hundreds of active participants from HE institutions worldwide. Over the course of the twelve days educators were introduced to a diverse range of free applications and resources with potential for use in teaching.

Regent's University London

Learning Resources

Librarians and learning technologists working together

Learning Resources at RUL comprises the library, learning technology, and media services teams.Chris and Andy's previous collaborations include a series of lunchtime workshops on copyright for academics, streamed as videos under the umbrella "The Copyright Trilogy". Last year they worked together on a Ten Days of Twitter course based on Helen Webster's work at the University of Newcastle.It was on the basis of this successful partnership that Chris invited Andy to get involved with the Twelve Apps of Christmas.

From all corners of the Earth

Photograph of Cairns, Australia, posted on discussion board for Day One by Julie Esson.

What we learned running the course:Make time for troubleshooting and technical issues, especially at start.Schedule time to monitor forums, social media etc, and do reply to posts.Social tasks (forum discussions, sharing, etc) build community and engagement.Catch up with students from other time zones who participate overnight.

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Padlet was one of the apps we looked at. The posts to this online "wall" are a good example of how social tasks engaged students and helped to build a community.Another wall created for this task (http://padlet.com/apjhorton/classroom) shows the collaborative benefit of the course, as learners shared their experiences and recommended a range of resources and apps, some of which will probably feature among this year's Twelve Apps.We felt it was important to maintain an element of fun for participants throughout the course. The daily cracker jokes were part of this, as was the light-hearted choice for the final app.

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Feedback

Credo Award

and "Christmas 2.0"

Twelve Apps of Christmas won the prestigious Credo Digital Information Literacy Award, which was presented at LILAC 2015.

Recognition of this sort, along with other demonstrable success, can be used to support further cross-department collaborations. There will be a Twelve Apps of Christmas 2015, and other projects on which the library and learning technology teams will be working together.